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It's cool that printers have this technology, but the flip side is that it actually makes the printers worse at being printers for doing prints.
by Suppafly 2y ago
It's cool that printers have this technology, but the flip side is that it actually makes the printers worse at being printers for doing prints.
- therein 2y agoSurprised there is no researcher dumping the SPI flash, patching some conditional jumps and doing a write-up.
- bitwize 2y agoIt'd probably get them visited by men in black suits and sunglasses if they tried.
- hiccuphippo 2y agoNot if they print the write-up.
- albert_e 2y agoGood way to tease out if the dot pattern is only ONE of multiple fingerprinting techniques that printers use :)
- astrange 2y agoBrother printers don't do it iirc, and they're the only good brand anyway.
- josephcsible 2y agoI'd say "the least bad brand" rather than "the only good brand" because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
- SahAssar 2y agoAre you sure? the only two on the EFF site say they do: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d... and it also says that basically all commercial printers do have tracking dots (last updated in 2017).
- kuschku 2y agoBrother B/W laser don't, Brother CMYK Laser/LED do. Brother CMYK printers only skip printing the MIC if they think they're printing an internal test page in maintenance mode.
- urbandw311er 2y agoThat was a very interesting bit of phraseology there my friend!
- HaZeust 2y agoGuy A: winks winks nudges nudges Guy B: LOOK EVERYONE, "GUY A" WINKED AND NUDGED!!
- urbandw311er 2y agoWas just showing my appreciation in a fun way, dude. No need to be such a dick about it.
- fnordian_slip 2y agoI still don't get it anyway, is the wink something that requires you to be a native speaker or am I just dense?
- redcobra762 2y agoThe commenter shared an oddly specific situation where the dots would not print, the knowledge of which implies something I won’t say, but will leave up to you to decipher.
- fnordian_slip 2y agoThanks, now I get it! I had completely ignored the "if they think" part of that sentence.
- 2y ago
- like_any_other 2y agoYes, it's very cool that I can print some protest leaflets or political posters, and have the police at my door the next day because "my" printer betrayed me thanks to a literal corporate-state conspiracy.
- kbelder 2y agoEven better; get a printer that doesn't do it, but manually add the id dots from the printer of someone you don't like.
- remram 2y agoHow do they even find you? Once they have your printer model and serial number, can they find the user? I can see how this could be used to prove or disprove it was some suspect's printer, or if it was the same printer between documents. And that's already a lot. But somehow I doubt that they have the database of serial number to person. For example you can pay with cash, and you can buy second hand.
- NikkiA 2y agoThe amount of effort required to track a specific serial number printer to its buyer means that the police are only ever going to get THIS involved if your protest leaflet happens to include original CSAM or snuff imagery.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- like_any_other 2y agoReading the dots and cross-referencing the serial number with credit card purchases doesn't seem like a lot of effort. In fact it seems extremely minimal.
- NikkiA 2y agoThere is no central database of printer->owner mapping. There is not even a per-vendor database of printer->owner mapping. To chase this kind of evidence a detective will have to a) find a technie to decode the dots for them, b) contact the printer manufacturer and ask if they can map a serial number to a retailer. c) contact the retailer to ask if they can map a serial number to a store. d) IF the store keeps a track of who buys which serial number, they can look that up, but otherwise e) ask for a rough data range of when that printer serial # was sold (query restock levels, etc, this MAY be doable via the retailer corporate level. and f) examine store CCTV if the printer was purchased within the X months that the store keeps their footage for. It's at best a 3 day job, but in reality it will take a week for all the back-and-forthing with the various contacts, and there's a very very good chance that any one, or all, of the contacts will want a warrant. It's not happening for a trivial 'someone posted a poster criticizing immigration policy', it might happen for a kidnapping (possibly if it's someone famous), particularly heinous CSAM user or rape, almost certainly for a murder or direct child abuse, and definitely for serial killers. And all it takes for the whole week to be pointless is the criminal to buy a printer from a yard sale or somewhere else where cash can be used to buy a used printer.